From A Tilted Pail Reviewed By Dean Cowan of Bookpleasures.com

Dean Cowan

Reviewer Dean Cowan:Dean is a freelance
Business Consultant, specializing in training and development in more
than one sector. He also works as a private writing tutor for
youngsters struggling with essays and exams at school. He is married
and lives in Manchester UK with his wife of 30 years and has a son, a
daughter and one grandson. His particular interests include,
education, writing, social sciences and politics.A struggling
blogger, he has many on-line at the moment but due to a low boredom
threshold losses patience with the technology.Prefers Facebook and
Twitter because of the lack of effort needed.

The first impression I had
of reading Vishwanathan’s series of seven short stories is one of
claustrophobia within a vast country, rich in culture and faith but
rife with poverty and customs which stifle the lives of his
characters. Written in spare poetic prose the writer concentrates
mostly on the experiences of small children caught up in a world too
big for them. Trapped in desperate life situations where they need to
escape. In fact escaping is a reoccurring theme in these stories
which contain many interconnecting motifs.

In the title story we meet
a small, nameless boy, forced into working in sweated labour,
separating silk from worm cocoons. The methods in doing this a
dangerous and cruel. The cocoons are thrown into buckets of scolding
water and he and the other small boys he works with, Ganga and
Chaami, (we never learn the narrator’s name) have to take out the
balls of silk with their bare hands. Vishwanathan describes the
methods of working in delicate but unsentimental terms in a dialogue
between the narrator and his older, more experienced friend, Ganga.

‘“Isn’t the
water hot?”

“It is. But I
don’t feel anything”. Ganga pulls his left hand out. I notice
dark purple blisters beneath his knuckles and tiny bubbles with fiery
rings of red around them. “You’ll get used to it”.

I don’t respond. I just
stare at his damaged hand.’

This numbing of feeling
due to the damaged skin and nerve endings within the hand serves as a
metaphor for the acceptances of suffering and the numbing of
emotional feeling. Eventually too the storyteller also stops feeling
the pain as his own hands as well as in his own emotional life. His
guilt ridden parents, who have taken him out of school in order to
work, avoid looking at his scars and blisters and are overwhelmed by
anguish at what their son is going through, but are powerless in the
face of the economic forces which led to their actions.

However within this and
the other stories there are acts of quietly dramatic rebellion.
Eventually the boy helps his friends escape from the factory, by
distracting the cruel and violent overseer’s woman as they slip
unseen at the back of oxen pulled cart. He however remains,
sacrificing his own freedom for the sake of his friends. Despite his
desperate situation he is more fortunate than they, as they are
separated from their families.

Other themes of casual
violence and oppression as described in brief scenes suggestive of
violence against women which in this and other stories take the form
of sexual coercion and as in the “Snake Walk” where once again
the nameless child narrator mentions the bruises on his mother’s
arm when his father the Snake Walker of the title is the worse for
drink. Also in the powerful final story “The Keeper of Lamps”
which involves a sharp critique of religious and gender power
relations within the Hindu religion where a beautiful woman is
regarded as a virginal deity by local worshippers unaware of the
nocturnal visits of the Thakur, village elder, who repeatedly during
secret nocturnal visits to her home, impregnates her with boys who
are taken away from her when born. The story ends with the planned
and dramatic escape of her adopted daughter who is being groomed into
the same role.

The escapees of the
stories disappear together or alone, but never to a specific
destination. They just escape, to nameless places without form or
structure, unlike the oppressive, cruel but predictable worlds they
are running from.

In “ Wind in the Hair”
Vishwanathan applies the techniques of flash fiction when he
describes the inner monologue of a Moslem girl, discarding her
traditional dress, uncovering her hair and donning jeans, before
stealing her father’s car keys and car, for temporary escape with
her younger brother. She knows that whereas her brother will be
scolded she will be get corporal punishment from her strict father.
Tradition holds that one should punish the daughter more harshly, but
the short moments of freedom are worth it.

Given the social realism
of the stories, one would expect the prose to be terse and spare.
However there is a lyricism in Vishwanathan’s writing which
reflects the warmth and vastness of the land he described and the
depth of his people.